Video surveillance in my current home automation setup consists of a couple of Vstarcam webcams that support a maximum resolution of 720p. In the post Adding a Web-cam I described how I added them to my Home Assistant Dashboard via http stream. They have been working quite reliably.

Recently I read a lot of positive reviews on the Wyze Cam which supports a higher 1080p full HD resolution. Wyze Labs also released a version of the firmware that supports RTSP. These features pique my interest and I decided to order one to try out in my system.

I initially tested the camera with the Wyze app on my Android phone. Setup was pretty straightforward. Video quality looks much better than the 720p stream I am used to, with higher clarity and deeper contrast. The native app is also more feature-rich and responsive. The default firmware does not support RTSP protocol, for that I have to download a special version from the Wyze Cam RTSP support page. The RTSP firmware is a separate branch from the official release, and Wyze Labs caution that it will not share the same release schedule and feature set of the official release. At the time of my testing, the features I noticed the RTSP version lacks are Motion Tagging and Person Tracking. So if these features are important to you, you won’t be able to use RTSP. For me, I chose RTSP over tagging and tracking. Here is how I setup the camera under Home Assistant Dashboard:

• Follow the instructions on Wyze Cam RTSP support page to download and flash the RTSP firmware
• On the Wyze app, go to camera Device Settings -> Advanced Settings -> RTSP to generate a RTSP URL. The URL has the format rtsp://user:password@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/live; add it to Home Assistant configuration as follow:

camera:
  - platform: ffmpeg
    name: Wyze Camera
    input: rtsp://user:password@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/live

• To add the video feed to Home Assistant Dashboard, use the following Picture Glance Card:

type: picture-glance
camera_image: camera.wyze_camera
camera_view: live
entities:
  - camera.wyze_camera
title: Wyze Camera

The is a roughly 2 seconds delay in the RTSP video stream, so for real-time monitor, the native Wyze app might still be a better choice.